No-till management practices can reduce soil erosion, but evidence suggests they can also lead to increased runoff of dissolved phosphorus from soil surfaces. Meanwhile, farmers looking to avoid herbicides often have to combat weeds with tillage, which causes erosion. With all of the tradeoffs of different management systems, which one should growers use?
Tech
San Diego, CA, June 11, 2013 – In a study using the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), investigators analyzed four years of data and determined that background mortality rates (rates of death irrespective of cause) are crucial in interpreting the numbers of deaths following vaccination. The VSD mortality rate following immunization is lower than the general US population mortality rate, and the causes of death are similar. These background rates can be used in communications to the public about vaccine safety risks, reports the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Using wood for energy is considered cleaner than fossil fuels, but a Dartmouth College-led study finds that logging may release large amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils. The results appear in the journal Global Change Biology-Bioenergy: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcbb.12044/abstract
ANN ARBOR—Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone, according to a new University of Michigan study exploring how social media reflect and amplify the culture's growing levels of narcissism.
The study, published online in Computers in Human Behavior, was conducted by U-M researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath.
LIVERMORE, Calif.— Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have confirmed the particle-by-particle mechanism by which lithium ions move in and out of electrodes made of lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4, or LFP), findings that could lead to better performance in lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, medical equipment and aircraft.
The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
The escalation in dust emissions — which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns — has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.
Whether it's an effort to increase recycling rates, reduce energy usage or cut carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom says that the best way to get people to do the right thing is to make it worth their while with cold, hard cash.
But Harvard researchers say there may be an easier, cheaper way – by appealing to people's reputation, not their wallets.
Biofuels developed from plant biomass and purpose-grown crops can substantially move California toward its ambitious energy goals, a new report says, but only through the wise allocation of feedstocks and the success of energy efficiency measures throughout the state.
With the daily mean concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide having reached 400 parts-per-million for the first time in human history, the need for carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuel energy has never been more compelling. With enough energy in one hour's worth of global sunlight to meet all human needs for a year, solar technologies are an ideal solution. However, a major challenge is to develop efficient ways to convert solar energy into electrochemical energy on a massive-scale.
COLUMBUS, Ohio—New technology under development at The Ohio State University is paving the way for low-cost electronic devices that work in direct contact with living tissue inside the body.
The first planned use of the technology is a sensor that will detect the very early stages of organ transplant rejection.
PITTSBURGH—Diabetes patients often receive their diagnosis after a series of glucose-related blood tests in hospital settings, and then have to monitor their condition daily through expensive, invasive methods. But what if diabetes could be diagnosed and monitored through cheaper, noninvasive methods?
It's not hard to tell the difference between the "charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult.
A single cell in our body is composed of thousands of millions of different biomolecules that work together in an extremely well-coordinated way. Likewise, many biological and biochemical reactions occur only if molecules are present at very high concentrations. Understanding how all these molecules interact with each other is key to advancing our knowledge in molecular and cell biology. This knowledge is of central and fundamental importance in the quest for the detection of the earliest stages of many human diseases.
The research team demonstrated a novel method to epitaxially synthesize structurally and compositionally homogeneous and spatially uniform ternary InAsyP1-y nanowire on Si at wafer-scale using metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). The high quality of the nanowires is reflected in the remarkably narrow PL and X-ray peak width and extremely low ideality factor in the InAsyP1-y nanowire/Si diode.
Because of the combination of environmental change and economic and social development, there are new pressures on the development and use of water resources. After 5 years of innovative research, Professor WANG Jianhua and his group, from the State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of the Water Cycle in River Basins of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, have developed a new coupled numerical hydrodynamic water quality model of the river environment.